Lost and Wanted(93)

But there was an alert with the thumbnail: “Charlie’s iPhone would like to share a photo.” It had been almost two months since I’d gotten a message; our last exchange—in which I’d threatened to report the phone as stolen—had occurred just before Neel’s engagement party, at the beginning of December. Amy joked about “ghosting,” but the fact was that Charlie ghosted even while she was alive, even before that practice had a name. She wouldn’t answer an email or a phone message for months, even half a year; I would be hurt and swear that I’d given up on her. Then, out of the blue, she’d send me something—a picture of Simmi, usually—and I’d write back right away. It occurred to me, as I typed, that I’d managed to develop the same type of relationship with whoever was using her phone.

I tapped “accept,” and the image opened on my screen. It was me and Charlie, on the day I’d been to visit her at their first house in L.A. Maybe we’d taken it when we went outside to drink coffee by the pool, or in front of the house before I left? At first I thought the poor resolution was due to the older device’s early-model camera, but even that didn’t explain how out-of-focus it was. I turned the phone horizontally to accommodate the photo’s orientation, and saw that it was a picture of a picture, taken on a table or desk (you could see the wood around the edges of the print). Part of my face, including one eye, was washed out by glare. If Charlie had reproduced it, she’d focused on herself, as well anyone might—it was an especially beautiful picture of her, vamping for the camera with her arm around my neck. My smile looked strained, the way it always does when I know I’m being photographed. The best pictures of you are the serious ones, Charlie once observed, but I only look good when I’m smiling. That was untrue: it was hard to take a bad picture of Charlie, regardless of her expression.

Where did you get that picture?

The oven.



The answer startled me, and I almost dropped the phone. There was only one time I’d held human remains in my hands. My paternal grandmother’s ashes had gone into a plot in a churchyard in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where she was born. I had been surprised by how coarse they were, more rock than ash. I thought then of the physical process that had occurred: the temperature inside a cremator can reach two thousand degrees—about a fifth as hot as the surface temperature of the sun.

I didn’t understand, and I sent back a question mark. The gray dots appeared, then disappeared, then appeared again. It took forever and I thought maybe the person on the other end was typing a detailed answer. But when it finally appeared, it was only four words long:

Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie.



I stared at them; my chest hurt. People all over the world knew that rhyme, but how many people knew what it meant to Charlie?

A fly can’t bird but a bird can fly.



The person on the end seemed to be waiting. A minute passed, and then another. Were they still there? I tapped out the next line, experimentally:

Ask me a riddle and I reply.



The response came immediately:

Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie.



    I heard a noise, or imagined it. I was standing in the front hall with my back to the door. I felt the walls contract around me; the person, whoever they were, had suddenly seemed to come much closer: from the generic symbols, to the scientific inquiries, to the hiatus when I hadn’t heard anything at all—was that planned, so I would let down my guard?—to the photograph and this poem, more intimate than anything I’d yet received.

Unlike my sister, I’ve always been afraid in a house alone. But our father instilled in us both a mania for saving electricity, and all my lights were off downstairs. I turned them on one at a time as I went through the living room and into the kitchen, to look out the window at the empty yard. I put my head into the small bathroom in the hall between the kitchen and Jack’s bedroom. It was unusual for his door to be closed, and I felt my pulse in my ears as I pushed it open.

Clothing, Legos, and a game of Battleship littered the rug, and Jack’s unmade bed was crowded with plush animals. I told myself I was being foolish. I stood there waiting for the phone to ping, and when it didn’t, I began cleaning up. I wanted to be doing something. Dust had been among the primary triggers for Jack’s asthma, and he still wasn’t supposed to sleep with more than one stuffed toy. They tended to accumulate, though, and so I started to put them away. Their glass eyes were strangely animate, a trick of the light.

I heard the noise again, now clearly the television coming from Terrence and Simmi’s apartment downstairs. At first the voices were reassuring. They were here; I wasn’t alone. And then I understood. The answer was so simple that I was ashamed I hadn’t thought of it. How is it possible, was what my parents used to say, on the frequent occasions when I failed to assimilate some piece of obvious practical information—someone as smart as you?

I picked up the phone from Jack’s bed, and typed out her name:

Simmi?



I waited for several minutes, but there was nothing more. I felt frantic: we both knew now, and so there was nothing to hide. I thought of calling the phone, but of course it couldn’t take voice calls. Maybe her father had said something to her from the living room, where he was watching television; maybe Simmi was stashing the phone in whatever hiding place, or series of places, she’d been using for the past eight months. I went to my door and listened; when there was nothing, I went down the interior stairs and stood just inside the front door, where I could pretend I was on my way out if Terrence were to open the apartment door. I could hear the TV more clearly here; it was a popular political drama, not anything that would interest Simmi. Where was she now?